Fifty years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the legacies we celebrate as distinctly his are bigger than the memory of the man himself. Which is almost impossible to imagine, given that he’s still so beloved, with 74 percent of Americans saying history will remember him as outstanding or above average, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Kennedy introduced ideas and programs that still shape the character and quality of life for virtually every American.

To mark the anniversary of his assassination today, we examine four of Kennedy’s visionary programs through the eyes of Arizonans who are carrying on his legacy.

They carry on Kennedy’s vision, remaking it through their ambitions and renewing it with the force of their intellects and emotional graces.

Nuclear non-proliferation. Aerospace. Civil rights. The Peace Corps.

Those are Kennedy’s most far-reaching legacies, according to historian Robert Dallek, author of arguably the definitive Kennedy biography, “An Unfinished Life.”

But beyond those four, Kennedy’s most important legacy is the sense of possibility he gave America at the time of his election, which remains part of the national consciousness today.

“His most enduring legacy is sustaining hope for a better country,” said Dallek, who in October released “Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House.”

“I think Americans are, at bottom, an optimistic people. This is part of the American ethos, that we can do better ... that we are reaching for the moon, that we can go beyond, that we can invent and achieve.

“We have setbacks and have moments of despair even, but ... I think there still is that hope. And Kennedy embodied that hope, and still does.”

Nuclear non-proliferation:Orde Félix Kittrie is a law professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe. He teaches in and directs the law school’s semesterlong Washington, D.C., program, while speaking, writing and advising the U.S. government on nonproliferation issues.

Kittrie is engaged in one of the world’s most important tasks. He endeavors to keep a 10th country from developing nuclear weapons and to facilitate the reduction of nuclear weapons among the nations that have them.

When he worked as the lead nuclear attorney for the U.S. State Department, Kittrie negotiated five non-proliferation agreements with Russia over the course of 16 trips to Moscow. The agreements helped find work for newly unemployed Russian nuclear scientists, enabled the destruction of some Russian nuclear-weapon materials and strengthened security measures for nuclear material inside Russia.

He also helped negotiate a nuclear-terrorism agreement at the United Nations, saying, “That was a real highlight.”

“To be trying to stop nuclear weapons from spreading, to me, it was the most satisfying topic I had ever worked on because the stakes were so high,” he said.

Kennedy was the first president to prioritize preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. By the time Kennedy became president, the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain and France had developed and tested nuclear weapons.

This led Kennedy to sign, with the Soviet Union and Britain, the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which Kittrie refers to as the first important treaty of its kind, adding that Kennedy “saw practical results even during his relatively short presidency.”

Kennedy was also good at explaining the importance of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, Kittrie said. “He was an especially eloquent man generally, but particularly on these issues.”

Kittrie said the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the president.

“Kennedy put it this way, ‘It’s insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, can choose to put an end to civilization.’ He thought to himself, ‘That is not something that is sustainable. We need to do whatever we can to minimize the chances.’

“He stared at the prospect of nuclear war and had seen it up close and had decided that it was a terrible thing.”

Kennedy was concerned that 20 or more countries would develop nuclear weapons.

“Thanks in part to his efforts,” Kittrie said, “there are fewer nuclear powers than he feared.”

Aerospace:Dorothea Ivanova is a professor of meteorology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott.

When Ivanova was a year old, the Space Race between America and the former Soviet Union began. She lived in Bulgaria, a Soviet satellite, so the superpowers’ push to put a man on the moon was a frequent topic of conversation between her parents.

“I was a very little child at the time, but they always talked about it, a man stepping on the moon. It was always my dream to participate.

“My students always ask, ‘How was the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the U.S.?’ and we have talked about the first satellite launched by the Russians and how the Space Race was won very shortly (12 years later) by the first men stepping on the moon, and how funding was poured into NASA, and scientists were hired to work on advanced problems,” said Ivanova, her voice rising with exuberance.

“And we also talk about how many problems solved in the space industry became, much later, very useful in our everyday life — GPS, the internet, computers, microchips, so many advances we’ve taken advantage of in materials science.”

After earning a degree in physics, Ivanova worked at the Space Research Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She and her coworkers looked to Americans for inspiration.

“It was always my dream to come and work for NASA because the work is so advanced.”

In 1994, Ivanova came to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for six months. She was invited to stay and has worked in the U.S. ever since. “It was everything I wanted; it changed my life.”

Now, Ivanova studies solar wind, radiation that can influence air travel, satellite performance and the function of electronic systems across the planet. She also works on climate modeling, particularly as it relates to the North American monsoon.

“It’s very important for us to understand because of the human loss of life and economic losses,” Ivanova said. “The monsoon is still so unpredictable, when it will start and how long it will last and what the flash-flood events might be.”

Civil rights: Edmundo Hidalgo is president and CEO of Chicanos Por La Causa, a community-development organization in Phoenix.

Hidalgo grew up in San Luis.

“In our household, and many Latino households, there were two things that were consistent — a Virgin of Guadalupe, and the other is a picture of Kennedy.”

In Hidalgo’s house, the photo of Kennedy hung next to an illustration of Mary in a prominent spot in a hallway. “To put him next to the Virgin, that is a huge thing in my house.”

President Lyndon Johnson signed and oversaw the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed major forms of discrimination based on gender, color, religion or national origin. But it was Kennedy who called for its creation during a televised speech on civil rights in 1963.

The entire Kennedy family was admired in Hidalgo’s house. His mom followed Jacqueline Kennedy, and everyone took notice when Robert Kennedy visited farm-labor organizer Cesar Chavez for the first time in Delano, Calif., and when he went to help end Chavez’s 25-day hunger strike. Two years later, Robert’s widow visited Chavez when he was jailed in Salinas, Calif.

“From when I was real little, I always had that connection with church and God through the Virgin Mary, and with the Kennedy family through their involvement of civil rights,” Hidalgo said. “My perception was the Kennedys were always willing to put themselves out there and not behave by the norms for the cause of what they believed in.

“The Kennedys visited (Chavez), and Coretta King visited him as well, and that represented part of that whole movement that our country was going through. Those are the connections on the dots for the Latino community — King, Kennedy and Chavez, same struggle and same aspiration — equal treatment and recognition that we all contribute.”

Peace Corps: Sam Tafoya of Scottsdale was a small-business development volunteer in the Peace Corps with the Azlag Dagger Maker Cooperative in El Kelaa M’Gouna, Morocco, from September 2010 to October 2012.

As part of an impromptu campaign speech in 1960, Kennedy planted the seeds for what would become the Peace Corps when he challenged students at the University of Michigan to contribute two years of their lives to helping people in developing countries.

Just after his inauguration, Kennedy established the Peace Corps on a pilot basis with a mandate to “promote world peace and friendship.”

Since then, 3,377 volunteers have come from Arizona — Tafoya is one of them — motivated by an impulse to create a cultural exchange in a country with many misconceptions about Americans.

“I wanted to give back to my country by showing others what our country is really like,” Tafoya said. “I helped shatter their myths about America being wealthy, being a culture of only Caucasians, that we’re not just from New York and California.”

After 10 weeks learning Moroccan customs and the Berber language, Tafoya went to work creating social-media and marketing content for artisans who handcrafted traditional daggers frequently given as gifts.

He now shares his insights of how the people he lived among for two years embraced him, regardless of differences in religion, language and cultural values.

“I took so much from them, so much more than I brought in to them,” Tafoya said. “How to thrive in a communal environment, how to share small amounts of food and what that means, and how people who can’t read or write can still be incredibly smart ... they have this enormous oral tradition.

“It taught me that I don’t need a lot of things, that I could survive as a minimalist because I had what’s important — family, food, time with people you care about, community.”

More than 210,000 Peace Corps members have volunteered in 139 countries.

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